The Inheritance

Show notes

Eisenhower’s signature is the clearest thing in the Bay of Pigs record. On 16 March 1960, the paper “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime” went to the President with four courses of action: build a unified Cuban exile opposition; run a propaganda offensive, including a gray radio station, probably on Swan Island; construct an intelligence and action network inside Cuba; and train paramilitary cadres outside the country to be infiltrated as organizers, trainers, and leaders of resistance forces. Six to eight months, the paper estimated. Eisenhower approved it on the 17th, telling Dulles that “our hand should not show in anything that is done.” That is the founding document — and it is also the most redacted where it counts: the funding line, the operational tabs, and three numbered paragraphs are still blacked out.

What the paper authorized was small teams of Cubans to seed a resistance. It authorized no invasion. Every layer of the record — the paper itself, the Inspector General’s survey of October 1961, the Marine colonel who ran the paramilitary staff, the CIA’s own official history — agrees on that. The agreement is the scandal, because within months the Agency was building something else. In March, Dulles approved $900,000 for the rest of the fiscal year; eighty-five percent was obligated within two weeks. By August the budget stood near $13 million, with Defense Department men and equipment attached, and in Guatemala a camp Hawkins described as “a small shelf of land on the side of a volcano, barely large enough for the comfortable accommodation of two hundred men” was giving way to concrete for an airfield at Retalhuleu.

The decisive question is who decided to trade the guerrilla concept for an amphibious assault, and the files do not answer it. By August 1960 the words “invasion,” “strike,” “assault” had entered the planning papers; the Inspector General later judged the strike-force concept had had no policy sanction at all. On 3 November 1960, the Special Group rejected a proposed 3,000-man conventional lodgment — and on 4 November, headquarters cabled Guatemala to begin planning an assault force of at least 1,500 infantrymen. On 15 November, the Agency’s own staff wrote that the beachhead force was “unachievable, except as a joint Agency and Defense Department action.” The CIA’s official historian, writing in 1979, asked how it then became achievable in March 1961 as an Agency-only operation with 1,200 men — and noted that both the Inspector General and the Taylor Committee had missed the question entirely.

Kennedy inherited all of it. On 18 November 1960, Dulles and Bissell briefed the president-elect; the briefing paper is missing, and the only account of what was planned is a 1979 reconstruction. On 28 January 1961, at the first formal presidential briefing — largely oral — Kennedy approved the continuation and accentuation of current activities. He did not approve a landing. As the Inspector General wrote that October: “There was no authorization, express or implied, that military action would in fact eventually be undertaken.” A program authorized for small teams and a resistance that never materialized had become an invasion force built on a paper that authorized no invasion — handed to a new president who was never asked, on the record we have, whether he wanted it to move at all.